Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include The End of Poverty, Comm…read more

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Sustainability is our only option. Anything else is suicide. Enlightened leaders being in short supply, or busy swimming upstream against the Obstructionists, its really up to the rest of us to make a stand for sanity. How shocking that with all the resources we have at our fingertips, our planet is such a mess. Leaders won't fix it. Its not in their interest. So we must change the paradigm. Read more

All goals must be supported by visible and known VALUES, and not assumed. The three core values of social sustainability (quality of life, growth and equality) have sustained our species for over a quarter million years. For societies to become sustainable, as well, organizations within communities, societies, nations and the global community of nations must embed these values into their vision, intention of existence and their daily decision-making processes. Read more

The goal of sustainable growth is an oxymoron. Sustainable saying that society must stop its ravaging of the earth's commodities. Growth implies that more commodities are going to be used.

I think we really need to stick to sustainable; however, I really don't think that it's possible in a world driven by Wall Street and profits. To get to sustainable you first have to control population and secondly get people to accept a more socialized (sharing) life style. We seem to be at the polar opposite of that goal. Read more

From Sustainable Development to Developing SustainabilityThat the idea of sustainable development has become institutionalized is apparent from its endorsement by numerous new sustainable development commissions and organizations that define policy for conservation, development, science, technology, and society. Yet the development myth – ‘it worked in the West, now take it on the road’– does not consider that what we regard as ‘developed’ may not be all that ‘developed’ after all. The discourse on growth is that growth itself is central to the development process – continued and expansive growth of free trade, of the production of goods and services, and of consumption, all of which centre on economic growth. This is paradoxical, since development measured in terms of economic growth – enabled by unlimited, unrestrained economic and resource consumption – is untenable as a sustainable strategy. Yet, growth continues to be the cornerstone of the development paradigm. The fact that less then 20% of the world’s population, mostly from ‘developed’ countries, consume over 80% of global resources and produce 80% of the global waste reveals the impossibility of poor countries ‘developing’ to the same extent economically. The problems surrounding the dominant development paradigm suggest that we are in need of a new model of development; one that develops sustainability rather than sustains development.International health activities and their continuation as so-called global health activities can be viewed as aspects of international aid. Over many decades the role, motives and success of the global north in bringing progress to the global south through development aid have been controversial. Many scholars have contributed to understanding why development aid has produced less than desired results, while conceding some successes.

It is also notable that aid is not entirely about development! To a considerable extent it can be viewed as a means of deflecting attention away from the vast quantities of wealth (material and human resources) continually extracted from poor countries by powerful nations to sustain their expectations of open-ended economic growth.

Political and economic forces influencing foreign aid and the many shortcomings of Official Development Assistance (ODA), both generally and in relation to global health have recently been described in some detail. Notably, a considerable proportion of donor aid is spent in donor countries. For example, since its inception in 1968 the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), has spent $12.4 billion in bilateral assistance to sub-Saharan Africa with much of this expenditure in Ottawa where 81% of its 1,500 employees work. Within this top-heavy system, dominated by a particular world-view little authority was given to field staff to design and implement projects or to allocate funds.

In 2007 about $100 billion was provided to developing countries in the form of ODA (less than 0.3 % of donor Growth National Incomes and well below the United Nations recommended 0.7%), while in the same year developing countries returned $590 billion to wealthy nations in debt repayment – most of this was interest on debt, making the debt almost un-repayable. Some of the debt incurred has been for major projects that had little chance of enhancing local economies, and many others result from imposition of donor country priorities, including the sale of weapons to corrupt leaders, enabling them to accumulate vast wealth and to wage local wars with devastating social effects. , Moreover, the arms trade seems to be associated with organized hypocrisy, as arms trading countries promote their own economic self-interest above the interests of inhabitants of rights-abusing countries who purchase weapons. In recent decades donor aid has increasingly been shifted towards a growing number of emergency humanitarian responses. These include food aid and military interventions in response to genocides or other human rights abuses. While humanitarian aid is admirable and necessary, such diversion progressively reduces money for infrastructural and other real development.

In a time of unprecedented knowledge, technology and wealth, there is simply no excuse for not surpassing whatever SDG goals are set.

People are ready for some major successes because of those factors. It is not the time for politicians to be timid or to set a low bar. Doing so at a time when people expect so much, due to our unprecedented advantages, will simply result in huge disappointment and rapid turnover of politicians.

That's not to say that politicians should just do something for the sake of doing it. But just barely. The impatience is palpable.

There are always challenges to governance and business, but never in the history of mankind on this planet have we had the resources that we now enjoy.

There is no reason good enough that we couldn't easily meet the following goals by 2030;

>>End energy poverty. Full access to electricity for everyone on the planet. >>Minimum 50% renewable energy target for ALL nations. >>Huge infrastructure/seed money boost in order to mine clathrate, to turn it into natural gas for power generation. It could become out biggest source of natural gas (and, no fracking required!)>>A Tobin Tax, with the funds used largely to enhance trade and port facilities to improve commodities-to-market transportation for developing nations -- instead of endless foreign aid.

>Methane Clathrate note: As the global climate warms (as you already know, that will happen as the CO2 and methane to cause that warming, are already present in the atmosphere) more 'methane ice' (methane clathrate) will 'melt' and release gigatonnes of methane into the atmosphere along with it's high Global Warming Potential (GWP) >There is plenty of natural gas, much of it locked up in frozen (for now) tundra in Siberia, Alaska and Canada.>Therefore, we must, whether it is economical to do so, or not! Cost is irrelevant when hundreds of gigatonnes of methane could be added to the atmosphere in a period of one decade -- once that particular tipping point is reached.>We must harvest as much 'top-layer' clathrate as is possible for the purposes of preventing that methane from ever reaching the atmosphere. >A supertanker-sized load of methane clathrate can be converted to natural gas and other useful products with relative ease. We have the technology. >What we don't have time for, is a couple of decades of waffling around on the clathrate issue. >The same is true with melting permafrost with its high methane load. (Digging it up to turn it into natural gas for power generation, is thousands of times better for our atmosphere, compared to just letting all of the methane escape into the atmosphere (as you know, but many don't)>Energy poverty is poverty, full stop. With electrification, people have more opportunities to become educated via the internet/home schooling/long distance learning, and will thereby be better prepared to enter a workforce, wherever they may be in the world. >Education is not limited to employment. Online learning can speed 7+ billion people towards the shared goals of humanity.

While meeting the MDG's are the most important contribution yet made by the UN, heartfelt kudos to the UN are always due, for all of the other good work done by UN agencies around the world.

The SDG's are even more important than the MDG's in my opinion as they will affect a much broader cohort, and unprecedented global civil unrest will be the result of unset or unmet SDG's.

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